Q Light Controller+

Hello companions of the art of lighting

I usually use the lighting console provided by the company that hires me for any show ... (theater, galas, concerts, festivals ...) (avolites tiger, titan, pearl !! (my favorite for Rock) LT hydra .. ...) sometimes, for small shows, small concerts, or even my own interests I use my own pc with linux and QLC ...........

Somehow, I always manage to do what I want, or need, with qlc, sometimes with a lot of effort ....

I would like to enjoy the new advances of versions like 4.12.2 .... but due to, (need for other concerts, where I make sound) the Linux versions that I use are not compatible with latest versions of qlc ... someone made it work good 4.12.2 in ubuntustudio 18.04, ect?)
I thought of making a small partition (10G-20G) with a "clean" Linux that works well with QLC 5, QLC 4.12.2 ect ..... video streams, sound- (mapmap) ....... .
What "linux" do you recommend?
No ubuntu or S.O full of things we never use .....
Any Debian version?
Any derivative of debian?
I get along with Debian ... but I can adapt to any environment ...

For me it works smoothly and effectively 4.12.1 qt4 in ubuntustudio 18.04 controlling dmx lighting (1 or 2 universes) and MapMap (OSC and script comand) v6.3 with 4 video projectors ........

But I would like to take advantage of each new functionality of each version of Qlc ..... and recommend it to other colleagues ......

Having said that:
What "linux" do you recommend?

PS: I hope someone understands something I say ......

Hello Andres,

I won't recommend a specific linux distro, because I think nowadays this is pretty much a matter of personal needs, taste and preferences. Debian and derivatives are great, as are Arch, Gentoo, you name it.

How much time you want to spend to tailor it to your needs? Some people invest a lot of time to narrow down and optimize their systems to the last bit, while others are happy to stick with dedicated preconfigured distros/derivatives like KXStudio, AVLinux and similar. Some hate systemd or pulseaudio, others don't care... and so on, there are so many aspects to consider and set in relation to your intended use.

Coming from using Atari computers during the 1990s, changing to x86 hardware and SuSE Linux (9.2 at that time) in 2002 when my Falcon started to fall apart, and always sticking with it, I've settled with openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is a rolling release but with the snapshot and QA system behind proves to be very stable and reliable. I work in a full KDE5/Plasma environment and QLC behaves reliable and feels responsive and quick under these conditions, with my Enttec DMX USB pro Mk2 and several MIDI controllers connected. For this full system I'm on a 40GB root filesystem so that's a bit bigger than what you have in mind. The main bottleneck on my laptop currently is RAM, I just ordered an extra 8 GB to get past the frequent swapping I'm experiencing on my (4GB RAM) Plasma desktop on a rather cheap i5 Asus laptop from 2016. I'm using this laptop for office work as well as all the creative stuff (audio editing, video, lighting, CAD, image processing...)

If you need a realtime kernel because you do live audio work this might be not the best choice, RT kernels aren't supplied as packages, and rather hard to build because of the many suse patches in the standard kernel... but for me the standard kernel with voluntary preemption (aka low latency) is good enough in pretty all my use cases.

just my 2 (or 200? sorry if i'm too verbose again) cents...

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience!!

Hi Andrés,
I'm using only Ljnux on all my computers. On my old laptop with Core2 Duo processor I use Xubuntu with XFCE4 window manager. On my new laptop with an Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM and SSD disks I use Ubuntu 18.04 with KDE/Plasma window manager. I'm using too KXStudio packages for audio (jack, ardour and other multimedia utilities that KXStudio provides).

Currently I have an Enttec DMX USB Pro, USB audio devices, 2 NanoKontrol2 and other multimedia devices. All of them are working properly on Ubuntu. I'm an amateur technician that collaborates on theater plays, concerts and other cultural events in my town. I started using QLC+ in 2014 and never disappointed me.

My recommendation is use a Linux distro that fits your needs, preferably a long support version. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint I don't used Arch or Gentoo.

Hi Santiago, Thank you very much for your contributions ....

To add ...
I have been using linux environments with software dedicated to sound and video for many years and it illuminates with dmx (magicq, qlc +) being qlc my preference for its freedom to be able to do what I imagine .....

My problem seems to be that my kernel RT configuration added to some QT4 and QT5 libraries living together to work with vst plugin or some audio host like carla ect ..... Being ubuntustudio 18.04 with kxstudio repositories and an aggressive "RT" configuration lo perfectly functional for me for live sound works ....
(Multitrack recording with ardor and some plugins inserted by channel in digital tables like Midas M32) ......
I could see that Qlc 12.12.2 seems to work well in several modern S.O linux .... Lubuntu 18.04 ect ......

My partial solution .... Split my hard drive in 2 to have my S.O adapted for my live sound works and another S.O with a light and modern Linux LTS branch just to run QLC + .....

In the cases that I need my PC for sound and lights, I will use the previous version of qlc +
Thank you both for the tips